Director, Mission Discovery & Incubation

If you are currently on Young Life staff, please apply internally through Workday’s Jobs Hub rather than this external board.

Young Life is a Christian mission organization. All employees and volunteers must profess faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, subscribe to the Young Life Statement of Faith, and uphold biblical standards in both work and personal life.

About the role

At Young Life, our mission is to introduce adolescents to Jesus Christ and help them grow in their faith. We invite you to join us in this life-changing work, building relationships and creating spaces where young people feel seen, known, and loved.

Responsibilities

• Define the strategy, operating model, roadmap, investment criteria, and priorities for Mission Discovery & Incubation.
• Establish clear entry, evidence, governance, transition, and stopping criteria that prevent premature scaling and ownerless innovation.
• Lead the organization through changes in product thinking by shifting conversations from requested solutions toward mission constraints, participant outcomes, evidence, and durable capability.
• Translate mission constraints into clearly framed opportunities through participant research, journey analysis, service signals, organizational learning, and cross-functional discovery.
• Clarify the participant, current experience, desired behavior change, expected mission value, material unknowns, and evidence required before investment.
• Recommend whether an opportunity should proceed to incubation, remain in discovery, move to another accountable capability owner, be deferred, or stop.
• Lead focused experiments, prototypes, pilots, and operating-model tests that reduce material uncertainty with the least necessary investment.
• Define hypotheses, learning agendas, success criteria, risk boundaries, decision dates, and accountable owners before work begins.
• Use approved AI capabilities to accelerate research, synthesis, prototyping, experimentation, localization, and pattern detection while preserving privacy, safety, evidence quality, and human judgment.
• Prevent prototypes from becoming unsupported production systems or permanent organizational commitments without explicit approval, ownership, and readiness.
• Evaluate opportunities using participant evidence, mission value, technical feasibility, global applicability, trust and safety, operational readiness, cost, adoption requirements, and long-term stewardship.
• Produce clear written recommendations to scale, transfer, continue learning, redesign, defer, consolidate, or stop.
• Define the enduring capability owner, operating model, funding, service model, and transition path before incubation becomes production dependency.
• Convert discoveries, experiments, failures, participant feedback, and service demand into reusable knowledge that strengthens future product strategy, experience architecture, and investment decisions.
• Maintain clear decision records, evidence, assumptions, risks, and learning so the organization does not repeatedly rediscover the same insights.
• Retire experiments, tools, and pathways that do not justify continued investment.
• Partner across GMET (Global Mission Enablement & Technology).
• Recruit, develop, and lead Product Managers, researchers, designers, strategists, and other practitioners capable of independently leading consequential discovery and incubation work.
• Build mechanisms and leadership capability that allow the function to operate without dependence on individual heroics.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree from an accredited university or college, preferably in a job-related major field of study.
• Minimum ten (10) years of experience in Product Management, Product Strategy, Innovation, Research, Human-Centered Design, Service Design, or multidisciplinary product leadership, or equivalent evidence of sustained scope and impact, including leading and managing complex initiatives or programs with outcome-focused deliverables.
• Or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Minimum three (3) years of managerial experience leading Product Managers, researchers, designers, strategists, or multidisciplinary teams.
• Demonstrated success leading discovery, experimentation, incubation, new-product strategy, operating-model validation, or strategic investment work.
• Strong understanding of modern Product Management, participant research, experimentation, service design, analytics, adoption, organizational change, and responsible AI-enabled product practices.
• Demonstrated ability to create clarity from ambiguity and translate evidence into strategy, investment recommendations, and executable transition paths.
• Exceptional written, facilitation, storytelling, executive communication, and strategic judgment.

Pay

The anticipated salary for this position can range from $97,350–$126,550 depending on relevant education, experience, and location.